Mutable materials and gathering worlds

Summary

Owing to a plethora of recent and ever more divergent scholarship on materiality, the lens through which we view the ontological status of things has become increasingly opaque. New thinking about the ways in which materials are always and already in flux compels us to consider how seemingly obdurate things can, paradoxically, transcend their own solidity. To this we may add a budding concern with the immaterial – regimes of light and sound, for example, and their mutability – and the extent to which such phenomena imbue and inform wider material meshworks. In this paper, I think through these themes with reference to the earthen enclosures of the central Great Lakes, which I argue were intended to gather together particular topographies, celestial objects, and materials as part of a broader commitment to place.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Archaeology and the New Materialism

Keywords

Spatial Coverage